I used to join forums when I was in middle school (even helped my friend build one in ASP.NET hah!), but they fell out of favor as Facebook and social media took over.
Of course, Facebook isn’t great for having deep and thoughtful conversations with like-minded people. Even our TheoTech Facebook discussion group is better for sharing content than discussing ideas.
My company TheoTech recently helped organize a summit on “COVID-19 and the Digital Transformation of the Church” in collaboration with Dr. Michael Paulus, Dr. Doug Strong and Daniel Herron. As a follow up we’re hosting a “Church Digital Transformation (CDX)” Discourse forum.
Discourse is an open source platform for “Civilized Discussion”. We could all use more of that, right? 🙂
It’s web-based so you don’t have to install yet another app to participate and it’s easily searchable by Google–meaning the content we co-create in the forum can be discovered by other people who care about the digital future of the church.
Being a forum means our ideas are more publicly shared than e-mail, but also more permanent than the random chatter on a Slack channel. Plus everything is linkable!
Below is a preview of what it looks like. After signing up you can go to the “Start Here” category to introduce yourself.
I was also pleasantly surprised to see support for “Progressive Web Apps”. This means you can install the forum to your phone as an app without going through an app store! It’s as simple as adding it to your home screen and will notify you when someone responds to your questions or ideas.
Why “Church Digital Transformation”?
I believe the capital-C Church is part of God’s cosmic purpose to unite heaven and earth in Jesus Christ. And digital is God’s means of fulfilling that purpose. All our work in tech, theology and service fit within God’s purposes for God’s people–which means that it’s all suitable for discussion, ideation, and co-creation in the CDX forum.
We’re just getting started and would love to have your voice. Click here to sign up and start a discussion!
By the way, if you missed the COVID-19 and the Digital Transformation of the Church Summit, check out these links to the resources from the event.
Also check out my recent Patreon post about Perseverance and the latest TheoTech podcast episode.
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